Archive for the Belts Category

You know, loyal readers, I’m always snappin’ on people like Charles M. Blow (here, for instance) for saying that the existence of casual sex negates the sacred human values of trust, caring and integrity. Yes, this op-ed is old, but it’s still as hilarious as ever! He phoned up a university professor to help him understand the “strange phenomenon” of hooking up, which he also says is a “strange culture”! Charles M. Blow could learn a lot about the topsy-turvy new world of sex by reading this blog. But what can we learn from him? What about those times when Charles M. Blow is right — when the simple hookup that you undertook with an attitude of devil-may-care insouciance comes back to bite you in the ass, stirring up primal emotions and feelings, causing your façade of carefree sophistication to tumble all around you like a flimsy house of cards? What will you do when you find that you’ve unconscionably trifled with the finer feelings and elevated sentiments of one of God’s fellow creatures, luring him to perdition and grief with your sensual wiles, you temptress?

Charles M. Blow doesn’t actually say that will happen; he just says that hooking up “isn’t a good way to find a spouse.” But today’s story proves that it can happen. It’s hardly fair, is it? All you were trying to do was spread some joy in this cold and bitter world. But just look at Margaret’s experience.

Margaret wrote in to us a few months ago, about a relatively trouble-free fling she had with a freshman at her university. But now, things have gotten more complicated. Margaret has two friends who are also friends with each other. Of the two, she has a big crush on “Rupert.” He’s “really really sweet but also kind of sarcastic and funny, we have the same interests, he loves books and films and tea, and when I talk to him I end up forgetting my troubles.” Good grief. This is right on the verge of being twee. He studies art, and before that “he studied Animal Biology, which is awesome because I was [once] a science geek, and also, he worked in a zoo! Which sounds cool even if it actually was just shoveling poop all day.”

Meanwhile, “Gerald” has a big crush on her. But as far as she’s concerned, he’s just a friend, and with good reason. He’s a few years younger than Rupert, and lacks some of his worldly sophistication. They both study the same subject, which “can get annoying because we both have really strong opposing viewpoints and Gerald likes to debate these a lot, and I am kind of like, ‘can we just shut up and watch Indiana Jones please!'”

Thus, a classic love triangle. Then one night a couple of weeks ago, all three of them were hanging out. “I got very very drunk on cheap scotch.” Somehow she ended up alone with Gerald. They “were messing around and somehow this led to some kissing. Which then led to him leading me to his room, and then we had sex.” I didn’t get a report on whether it was fun or not, because Margaret claims the sex “wasn’t the point.” She was more eager to point out that she was wearing the very same dress she had on when she first encountered “Fresher” in the previous story. “It is not low-cut and it’s quite loose and… like a big t-shirt with pretty flowers on the neckline. Are big t-shirts sexy?” Let the people be the judge; I convinced her to send me a photo.

White dress

In the e-mail she originally sent to me, Margaret continued as follows: “Sleeping with Gerald was quite a retarded thing to do… [but] I actually consider him quite a good friend, so it’s not the most terrible thing that’s ever happened that we slept together, it’s not awkward or anything between us.”

However, a week passed before Margaret got around to sending me pictures of the dress. During that time, the situation deteriorated. She and Gerald had a serious talk: “It turns out that Gerald actually really likes me quite a lot. For me, the situation was like, ‘haha, I got drunk and slept with this guy, that was a bit silly, seeing as I like his friend,’ but now everything is awkward and horrible and I can’t do anything with Rupert because it would make Gerald cry. Gerald chose to wait ’til a few days after we had sex to tell me this as well, if I knew before, I clearly wouldn’t have slept with him (I don’t think).”

“And now that he has told me, I’m really aware of how I act around Rupert when Gerald’s there, trying not to be too flirty, and also I am really aware of how I act around Gerald, like I’m trying to be normal but I don’t want to be too nice in case he thinks that I secretly love him, but not too nasty because it’s not his fault that he is a little bit in love with me, and I still want to be his friend…. Argh! I think this has turned into a clothes that got me laid FAIL. Well, win in the sense that I did get laid, fail in the sense that my life is now hideously dramatic because of it.”

That sounds really awkward. It’s too late to do anything about it now, so let’s try to figure out what it is about this dress.

Winning outfit

Above is the full outfit, including brown tights, brown cardigan, gold belt and gold flats. Margaret finally concludes that “I think I’ve figured out the secret of the magic dress: You can see the whole of my legs. It is like I am not even wearing a skirt.” What do you guys think?

People loved the story I posted about Georgiana and her black, thigh-high suede boots. They also love it when I post pictures of “fit girls,” as I found out from reading Daily Sport. If you enjoy both those things, you are my base, and will want to see this recent post on Street Boners. Don’t look at it at work, though!

“Margaret” recently graduated from a small arts college in the southwest of England. She’s currently teaching, and plans to go to Bali next year to study gamelan. The summer after college ended, she moved back to her college town. “I still have friends at the college, including some guys who are in a band. This band played at the college during Freshers’ Week this term, and I went along with another friend (“Abby”) to see them play.” She goes on to ask “do you have Freshers’ Week in the U.S.?”, but I think it’s just the same thing as Orientation.

She was wearing “a really short white dress with short sleeves and pretty embroidered flowers around the neckline, a black and silver waist belt with the buckle shaped like 2 swallows, a black cardigan, black opaque tights, and silver flats.”

White minidress

Black cashmere cardigan

Silver flats

Margaret felt odd being an alumna and hanging out with a bunch of current students; “this was the first time I’d been back to this pub or on campus at all since our emotional goodbye party at the end of my last term there.” Also, “I found that I knew a really small number of people at the pub that night.” She couldn’t talk to her friends in the band, because they were performing most of the night, and her friend was busy reminiscing with a hometown friend she had encountered.

“I was feeling at a bit of a loose end. I did the only thing I could to alleviate all my feelings of weirdness and got wrecked. And when I get wrecked, I get quite… kissy. So I was wandering around trying to find someone I knew, and while I was doing this I looked over at Abby, who had started making out with this guy she knew from home (apparently she had a big crush on him when she was younger, but he knocked her back! And they were chatting about this, and he clearly came to the conclusion he was wrong).”

Our heroine followed suit: “What happened next was I grabbed the nearest person I sort of recognised, who happened to be a fresher who I had met briefly earlier that evening. I may have started talking to him, or I may have simply grabbed him and started kissing him. I remember thinking that it was fortunate he was walking past, because he’s really tall and so am I, so I tower above most boys I know. We spent the next hour or so kissing in front of the pub (I assume, I can’t really remember this part of the night).”

After Abby got a taxi home, “I decided to stay over in Fresher’s room (because I had been watching a lot of Sex and the City those past weeks, and decided it was the thing to do).” Young people are so suggestible. It is fortunate that the things popular culture encourages them to do are, for the most part, benign. A hundred years ago, recent college grads were probably all like, “So I decided to go civilize Africa — I had been reading a lot of Joseph Conrad that week, and it seemed like the thing to do.”

“Although we didn’t have sex, we had an entertaining night together, mainly with him enthusiastically going down on me. I then spent a really long time telling him how I was really old (I’m not, just he’s quite young, like 19) and how it was weird that I was an ex-student but I was still hanging around college (it wasn’t that weird) and that I used to live in the same halls of residence that he does (that was a bit weird).”

This boy was “quite nice,” and his actions had disproven the Teuterian stereotype that young dudes are all inconsiderate lovers. However, she didn’t want to keep messing around with him “because he had just started university and I didn’t really want to be a part of that, I’d done the whole student thing already. So I bumped into him a couple more times at the pub, and we talked a bit but nothing else really happened til last week. I went up to the pub again to see another friend who is still a student, and she knows some people in Fresher’s halls, so I ended up talking to him and some others in his room.”

“We then went into the kitchen to make coffee, and for some reason he was sucking on a lollipop. So, being a little drunk again, I started flirtatiously pulling the lolly out of his mouth and putting it in mine, which inevitably ended up with us kissing again, which we carried on doing until someone walked in the kitchen and busted us.” These college hookup stories are always so complicated, like “we went to make out in my dorm room, but there were already other people making out there, so we decided to go to his room, but on the way there we ran into the drug dealer, and we had to go to the ATM to get money to buy weed, and then after we got stoned, we all decided to go to a nightclub, but we waited half an hour and our taxi never came, so {etc., etc.}.” They’re like these ridiculous shaggy dog stories, where you have to go to twelve different locations just to get some cock.

Or not, as in this case: “We went back and rejoined the people in his room, carried on talking, and that night I decided I didn’t want to stay with him, I would prefer to go home and sleep in my own bed. I was pretty tired, and I think had some stuff to do the next morning or something.” She was wearing a black miniskirt. “There seems to be a correlation between the nights I wear short skirts and the nights I get laid.”

The next night she went to a party/event thing on campus, wearing “a HOT short bright red dress with an empire waist and appliqued roses all over the chest, the same black cropped cardigan from the night before, a skinny black belt round my waist, and red red lipstick. I was proud of this outfit.”

Red empire-waist minidress

Red and gray vintage Caroline Herrera minidress

The chaste relations between her and Fresher couldn’t last long; “I never really think of him except for when I am drunk, when I find him really really attractive and all I want to do is jump him.” There were bands and DJs at this thing, “so I spent most of the evening dancing, and eventually saw the boy and as I predicted, started kissing him again. We went back to his room at the end of the night, and this time we did have sex, but I refrained from talking about how weird/old I was.”

“This time the walk of shame in the morning was pretty bad, I got up to pee in the morning so just pulled my dress on without my underwear, and then when I went to go home, I couldn’t be bothered with taking the dress off again to put my bra on, so I just walked out with my bra in my hand. And opened the door to the WHOLE of the floor, who were going to the shops and were just about to ask my Fresher if he wanted anything. I was like, hi, guys… here’s my bra.”

Will it happen again? “I think the No Drama Obama way would be to not pursue this. However, I am fairly sure that next time the both of us are in the same place at the same time and alcohol is involved, I’ll end up getting in his bed again. Probably wearing black tights and a short skirt.”

I always want to keep this website topical, so you’re a reader in a pro-Obama country (United States, Kenya, Indonesia, etc.) and you get laid on election night, tell me about it. I know personally, for a fact, that people were having victory sex that night. (I know this because I read it on the internet.)

“Rachel” is a university student living in Brisbane, Australia. She describes her motive in writing in to me thus: “I recently had a bit of a roller-coaster ride of a non-relationship with this guy, am currently at the stage of hating every fibre of his being, and have decided that to write it down would be therapeutic.” Actually, I think that’s what happened with most of the sad bastards who write in to me.

Rachel’s story begins when “I met this guy… I’ll just say that he has one of those dreamy names that’s always given to sexy fictional characters and that tends to make girls swoon.” I will call him Glenn. “I met him because we worked at the same restaurant for a few months. I was on pretty good terms with lots of the other people there, but didn’t know him too well – until a party at one of the other peoples’ houses.” Rachel had found at that Glenn was leaving the job soon, and she went to the co-worker party because “I kind of liked him.”

“I was at work that evening, and some people there convinced me to quickly go home, change and meet them to share a taxi once our shift was done. The problem: WHAT TO WEAR? You see, it was a costume party! After a bit of brainstorming, it turned out one of the boys in the kitchen had a sailor hat he could lend me.”

Sailor's cap

“Upon getting home, I changed into a CUTE little dress – bold blue and white stripes, halter neck, kinda flared skirt ending just above the knee. Combined with a denim jacket, flat gold sandals and (of course) the hat, I made a kick-arse sailor. So I met up with my friends and made it to the house party on the other side of the city by 11 p.m.”

Blue and white striped dress

Wrangler denim jacket

Gold sandals

Many of the other guests weren’t even in costume, and she easily outclassed them. “I spent most of my time at the party talking to/flirting with Glenn (and drinking), and by my fourth drink was sitting on his lap (of course). When he whispered all deep-voiced in my ear ‘meet me outside in 30 seconds,’ I sure knew what was coming. Glenn and I went for a ‘walk’ and ended up making out in the park across the road from the party. Can I just mention that it was the middle of winter and I was wearing a short dress, so despite the jacket I was FREEZING. It detracted from the fun somewhat.”

“After at a guess an hour of that, I saw a cab pull up outside the house and knew it was the one meant to be taking me alllll the way back home with the other people who live near me. Glenn was trying to get me to go back to his place, which was just around the corner and apparently had plenty of blankets to warm me up.” I would probably accept an offer like this — it’s cold in my house right now — but she declined. “He also used the somewhat flawed ‘what if I never see you again’ argument. Dude, I know you’re leaving the job, but we live in the same city and I have an email address and a phone.”

On the way home, Rachel sat “in dazed silence mulling over the events of the evening.” She ended up sleeping on a friend’s floor, and since her dress “made shitty winter pyjamas, I just about froze to death.” Probably, this was God’s punishment on her for turning down free sex and blankets. If that’s the case, there was more persecution to come. Rachel waited for her hot guy to contact her, but days and then weeks passed, and he didn’t call. He did, however, waste her time with some lukewarm Facebook messaging.

After a few weeks of this, she concluded he wasn’t really interested, she concluded that he wasn’t really interested, so “when I was asked out by another friend (also a friend of Glenn’s) I didn’t see any reason to say no. This resulted in Glenn getting really angry/stroppy at me and his friend, because apparently despite not showing further interest in me and telling his friend that nothing was happening, he was *actually* just waiting for an opportunity or something.” What a dork. He was “sending me long angsty messages about how he had thought I was out of his league and wanted me to give him another shot (causing me much stress and guilt and tears).” She felt bad, and so she “decided I had made a terrible mistake and that I really liked Glenn. I decided the best option was to stay friends with the other guy rather than date him.”

When she saw Glenn next, she was out drinking with friends, “wearing a satin, cream-coloured dress with a colourful flower pattern around the hem and a gold belt around my waist, over black opaque tights, with black lace-up ankle boots.”

She was “extremely drunk (and thus emotional). We had a talk, which I can remember little of as I have rarely been as drunk as I was that night. The talking led to reconciliation making out, at which point I decided it would be a good idea to hop in a cab and go home with him.” “*Facepalm*”, she adds, in an eloquent display of self-reproach, she adds. But how could she have known? “I kind of expected that after the whole fuss he kicked up when the other guy asked me out, he would actually… want to be involved with me himself.”

Instead, they returned to their pattern of pointless Facebook contact. “When I was particularly friendly or showed interest, he would tend to be fairly dismissive and make me feel like an idiot. For a few weeks a pattern continued of seeing him with mutual friends when drinking and making out, but that fizzled out too.”

How are we to describe a dude like this? Rachel writes that “maybe asshole is being a little harsh – but I was pretty mad that he was such a drama queen… only to get what he wanted and then be interested in nothing more than the occasional hook-up.” Hmmm. “Asshole” may be the mot juste. Glenn, however, is the one who actually has cause for regret. Rachel points out that her outfits at the time were “fantastically cute. And that’s what matters.”